Road.cc celebrates 15th birthday, publisher reports 2.7 million users this summer

Fifteen years ago this week, two men launched Road.cc, the UK cycling website, from a campervan in Southern Germany.

Tony Farrelly and Dave Atkinson published the site’s first pieces of tech content from Eurobike 2008, rounding up highlights from the show.

Their goal was to provide informative, authoritative, independent and engaging news, reviews and features aimed primarily at a UK road cycling audience.

That first month Road.cc attracted 80,744 unique users – helped by an early plug from their friends at Singletrack.

Fifteen years later and that number has grown to a monthly average of 2.3 million users in 2023 rising to 2.7million this summer with the majority still from the UK

Road.cc has also grown beyond just the website, building audiences through video, podcasts and social media.

That growth has enabled F-At Digital, the company founded by Farrelly and Atkinson to launch Road.cc, to develop a stable of cycling-related websites with sister sites Off.road.cc and ebiketips.co.uk.

This summer also saw the publisher launch electric vehicle website ev.tips – envisaged as an EV version of Road.cc.

Between them those sites attract more than three million unique users every month, 5.8 million annual video views and a monthly community reach of 10.4 million.

Road.cc founder Tony Farrelly says the site’s success has been built on sticking to its founding principles.

Farrelly said: “We set out to win the trust of our audience with honest, straightforward news, reviews and buying advice that reflected the real world experience of British cyclists.

Read more: Ison Distribution adds Revoloop inner tubes to its portfolio

“Once we’d established that trust we made it our overriding mission to maintain it. We couldn’t have done that without the dedication and talent of our writing team, lead by a very talented editor in Jack Sexty, and the people that support them: designers, the sales team (special mention to Elaine our commercial director); and, now we’ve moved into video our presenters, editors and videographers too.

“Of course, Road.cc also couldn’t have achieved what it has without the support of the many, many cyclists that make up our audience and, crucially, the cycling industry, some of whom backed us pretty much from the start with review kit and, once we’d got round to hiring an ad sales person, ads too. Aside from our size nothing has changed. Okay, we don’t work out of a campervan any more.”